adobe

So you got yourself some Adobe CS3 products, but you're still trying to get your workspace organized or iron out your cross-product workflow or how to use the Puppet tool in After Effects? Apparently lots of other people are in the same position according to a case study from EffectiveUI, developers of Adobe's online Video Workshop application built using Adobe Flex. The tutorials have seen more than 5 million plays over its first year.

The video tutorials cover 22 of Adobe's products including all the CS3 components and span 47 topics. The information comes from product experts … Read more

With Adobe Systems' release of version 2 of its Photoshop Lightroom on Monday night, the company no doubt hopes customers will be drawn by a number of new features in the software for sorting, cataloging, and editing photos.

But the company believes an external factor will also help the software: the booming sales of high-end SLR cameras. These high-end models are helping usher in many of digital photography's biggest changes, and Adobe is trying to intercept the trend with Lightroom.

From 2007 to 2008, digital SLR shipments increased a dramatic 41 percent to 7.5 million units, according to market researcher IDC. And though plenty of those cameras went to gadget-happy doctors or to snapshooters who won't exploit the cameras' full features, plenty of others went to the photography enthusiasts at whom Lightroom is aimed.

"Prices are coming down, so more people with entry-level SLRs are experimenting," said Tom Hogarty, the Adobe senior product manager in charge of Lightroom. "If you pick up the camera for the sake of creating an artistic thing and not just recording a family event, you've really taken the plunge into serious photography. Anyone at that level is an ideal Lightroom customer."

One significant feature common to SLRs is the ability to shoot "raw" photos--the images taken directly from the image sensors without the camera baking in its own assumptions about what's right.… Read more

Adobe Systems is revamping its Media Player with a new interface and a deal that will let users of the software watch movies from Sony Pictures.

The interface update in the new version 1.1, due to ship Tuesday afternoon, presents users with a larger number of video shows. "There's more content that we surface earlier," said Ashley Still, senior product manager for Adobe Media Player.

The new Sony partnership means people will be able to watch full-length movies, including Jerry Maguire and Men in Black, on Adobe Media Player, she said. A total of about 600 … Read more

Not sure how useful this will be for most folks, but if you're a fan of browser-based chat service Meebo and would like to use it right on your desktop an Adobe AIR application called Meebone will do just that with some elegance.

Like Gabtastik, which does the same thing with Facebook Chat and Google Talk, Meebone will effectively trick the Web app into thinking it's running in your browser. The big difference is that you'll be able to move chat windows around and minimize them to your taskbar like you would any other desktop chat app.… Read more

On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss this week's big stories. It was a busy week on the search front. Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with Flash Player technology that allows their search engine crawlers to find and index SWF content, including Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites. It's good to make more information accessible via search engines. However, Microsoft has been silent on whether Live Search would index Flash content.

In addition, Microsoft bought Powerset for about $100 million to enhance … Read more

And that, my friends, is how we get you to listen all the way to the end. But in actual news of the day, a judge ordered Google to expose the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users. But it's OK, because only a few people will get to look at them. That's fine, right? Also, we freak out about privacy and identity theft, just in time for a study that acknowledges that consumers are freaking out about privacy and identity theft. Plus, the power of video compels you...to switch to broadband.

Adobe Systems announced on Monday that it was taking steps to make Flash content on the Web more easily indexed by search engines. It touted deals with both Yahoo and Google, the top two search engines. Curiously absent was any statement about whether Microsoft would do likewise with its Live Search.

I was hoping that Microsoft might clear up the matter, but its response was "no comment." (It said it's possible that it'll have more to say, and I will post more when and if that comes.)

It's unclear whether there is a stumbling block … Read more

Adobe Systems' popular portable document format, or PDF as it's more well-known, has become the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard as of Wednesday morning.

Adobe has been the key developer and patent holder of the technology, and on Wednesday passed over the entire specification of version 1.7 to the Geneva-based ISO. This comes just a year and a half after Adobe made plans to open up by giving the specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) which was to lay the groundwork for ISO certification.

The ISO has issued a press release about … Read more

Flash has not been easily searchable until now, but Adobe Systems is working with leading search engines Google and Yahoo to solve the problem. CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber and reporter Elinor Mills discuss the impact of making Flash pages more visible to search engines. One question is whether Microsoft, which developed Silverlight, a competitor to Flash, will also index Flash files in its search engine.

Watch the video:

See also:

Uncloaking 'invisible' Flash Web content

Adobe unveils Reader 9 with Flash